{"id":21530,"date":"2025-04-21T15:19:06","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T19:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21530"},"modified":"2025-04-21T15:33:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T19:33:08","slug":"1775-putting-tyrants-on-the-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/21\/1775-putting-tyrants-on-the-run\/","title":{"rendered":"1775: Putting Tyrants on the Run"},"content":{"rendered":"
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William Barnes Wollen painting, 1910 (public domain)<\/p><\/div>\n

1775: Putting Tyrants on the Run<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, April 21, 2025<\/p>\n

April 19 was the 250th anniversary of American militiamen routing the best army in the world<\/strong>. Seven hundred British troops arrogantly came out of Boston early that day in 1775 to seize firearms and gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. By the time the tattered remnants of that force escaped back to Boston, hundreds of British troops were left dead, wounded, or captured along the road. The \u201cshot heard around the world\u201d became one of the most dramatic blows against tyranny in modern history.<\/p>\n

But the hard truths of the American Revolution are being obscured by Leviathan-loving pundits.<\/strong> Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.\u2014President John F. Kennedy\u2019s court historian and a revered liberal intellectual\u2014declared in 2004, \u201cHistorians today conclude that the colonists were driven to revolt in 1776 because of a false conviction<\/a> that they faced a British conspiracy to destroy their freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

The colonists revolted because they were being bayoneted down the road to serfdom.<\/strong> The British parliament passed law after law trumpeting Americans\u2019 legal inferiority to their foreign masters. The Sugar Act of 1764 resulted in British officials confiscating hundreds of American ships, based on mere allegations that the shipowners or captains were involved in smuggling. To retain their ships, Americans had to somehow prove that they had never been involved in smuggling\u2014a near-impossible burden.<\/p>\n

The Declaratory Act of 1766 announced that Parliament \u201chad, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority<\/a> to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.\u201d That meant Parliament could never do an injustice to the Americans, since Parliament had the right to use and abuse colonists as it pleased. That law was modeled after an earlier British dictate\u2014the Irish Declaratory Act of 1719. The British were notorious for treating the Irish as bad or worse than slaves. Perhaps the most influential political philosopher in America in the pre-Revolution times was John Locke, who warned in his Second Treatise on Government<\/em> in 1690: \u201cHe who attempts to get another man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him.<\/strong>\u201d Colonists paid fierce attention to Locke\u2019s warning: \u201cTyranny is the exercise of Power beyond Right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans felt like they were being hit by a British blockade even before the Brits forcibly shut down the Boston harbo<\/strong>r. Britain imposed heavy taxes on imports and prohibited Americans from erecting any mill for rolling or slitting iron; British statesman William Pitt exclaimed, \u201cIt is forbidden to make even a nail for a horseshoe.\u201d The Declaration of Independence denounced King George for \u201ccutting off our trade with all parts of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

To enforce heavy tariffs on tea and other items, King George issued \u201cwrits of assistance\u201d t<\/strong>hat let British soldiers \u201csearch settlers\u2019 belongings at random to find out who was evading import taxes by smuggling whiskey or tea.\u201d These writs empowered \u201ca civil officer [to] search any house, shop, warehouse, etc.; break open doors, chests, packages… and remove any prohibited or uncustomed goods or merchandise.\u201d James Otis\u2014a lawyer arguing against the writs in a Boston court in 1761\u2014denounced them as \u201cthe worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of law\u201d and declared the writs conferred \u201ca power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.\u201d In 1772, the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence described the writs\u2019 effects: \u201cThus our houses and even our bedchambers are exposed to be ransacked and plundered by wretches, whom no prudent man would venture to employ even as menial servants\u2026. By this we are cut off from the domestic security which renders the lives of the most unhappy in some measure agreeable.\u201d Colonial opposition against writs, according to John Adams, ignited the flame that led to American independence.<\/p>\n

Vermont patriots marched in 1775 against the British Army under a flag depicting a pine tree\u2014a symbol of British tyranny<\/strong>. Because pine was an excellent material for building ships, Parliament banned cutting down any white pine trees\u2014claiming them all for the British crown without compensation. Historian Jonathan Sewall, writing in 1846, claimed that the conflict with Britain \u201cbegan in the forests of Maine in the contests of her lumbermen with the King\u2019s surveyor<\/a>, as to the right to cut, and the property in white pine trees.\u201d Historian Robert Albion wrote in 1926: \u201cThe royal interpretation of \u2018private property\u2019 practically rendered that term nugatory, so\u2026the pines were virtually being commandeered by the Navy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any contemporary historian who seeks to exonerate Britain should be required to explain how freedom can co-exist with total disarmament.<\/strong> April 19 had proven that the British troops were ill-matched with colonial militia. As historian John Hyde Preston wrote in 1932, \u201cThe average British soldier was the poorest shot in the world; he couldn\u2019t hit a horse at ten yards.\u201d Two months after the clashes at Concord, American sharpshooters gunned down every British officer on the field at Bunker Hill\u2014along with a third of the Redcoats who charged up that hill.<\/strong><\/p>\n

British General Thomas Gage responded to that debacle by decreeing that \u201canyone found in possession of arms would be deemed guilty <\/a>of treason,\u201d as Professor David Kopel noted. Britain planned to confiscate almost all the firearms in the colonies after suppressing the revolt. If they had succeeded, colonists could have been subjugated to London for generations. George Mason\u2014the father of the Bill of Rights\u2014declared that the British decided that \u201cto disarm the people… was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSlavery by parliament\u201d was a rallying cry in the colonies in the 1770s<\/strong>. Many American colonists believed that, for them, British representative government was a fraud. The \u201cDeclaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,\u201d issued by the Second Continental Congress on July 6, 1775, a few weeks after Bunker Hill, highlighted the crimes of the British Parliament. (The Declaration of Independence, issued almost a year later, concentrated on King George III as the personification of British abuses.) The 1775 Declaration, written by John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson, complained that \u201cthe legislature of Great-Britain, stimulated by an inordinate passion for power…attempted to effect their cruel and impolitic purpose of enslaving these colonies by violence.\u201d The Continental Congress demanded to know: \u201cWhat is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power? Not a single man of those who assume it, is chosen by us; or is subject to our control or influence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 1775 Revolution was largely a revolt against growing arbitrary power<\/strong>. Americans of the Revolutionary Era recognized that the passage of a law did not signal the end of a legislative onslaught. Instead, it is merely the starting point to pursue the act\u2019s \u201clogic\u201d to stretch political power further. Americans looked at the precedents being established by British rulers\u2014the suspension of colonial legislatures, the dragooning of Americans into the British navy, the suppression of the right to trial by a jury of one\u2019s peers\u2014and saw their cherished \u201cancient liberties\u201d rapidly vanishing. John Dickinson\u2014a prominent colonial pamphleteer\u2014wrote in 1768 that \u201cthe crucial question in the colonists\u2019 minds is \u2018not, what evil has actually attended particular measures\u2014but, what evil, in the nature of things, is likely to attend them.\u2019\u201d Edmund Randolph\u2014George Washington\u2019s first attorney general and governor of Virginia\u2014declared that the American Revolution was a revolution \u201cwithout an immediate oppression, without a cause depending so much on hasty feeling as theoretic reasoning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas Paine, in his writings to stir Americans to support the Revolution, noted the widespread belief \u201cthat government is some wonderful mysterious thing.\u201d The American Revolution succeeded, in part, because its leaders recognized the scams that British politicians sought to foist upon them. It was a common saying in the 1770s: \u201cThe Restraint of Government is the True Liberty<\/a> and Freedom of the People.\u201d Americans heeded another warning from Locke: \u201cI have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away every thing else.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Studying the Revolutionary era can help vaccinate Americans against contemporary political frauds.<\/strong> As Sen. John Taylor\u2014who had been a colonel in George Washington\u2019s army\u2014aptly declared in 1821: \u201cIn defining a tyrant, it is not necessary to prove that he is a cannibal.\u201d Americans back then had far better philosophical compasses than the prevailing models nowadays. But it is not too late to learn from the heroic leaders and visionary thinkers who vanquished the world\u2019s most powerful empire 250 years ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1775: Putting Tyrants on the Run by James Bovard, April 21, 2025 April 19 was the 250th anniversary of American militiamen routing the best army in the world. Seven hundred British troops arrogantly came out of Boston early that day in 1775 to seize firearms and gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. By the time the tattered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[446,144,869,4539,4534,4264,4535,4541,280,3531,1165,4540,1204,445,4536,4533,2174,3868,3533,4537,811,443,935,2664,1818,4538],"class_list":["post-21530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-revolution","tag-boston","tag-britain","tag-bunker-hill","tag-concord","tag-declaratory-act","tag-gage","tag-geore-washington","tag-gun-control","tag-james-otis","tag-john-adams","tag-john-dickinson","tag-john-locke","tag-john-taylor","tag-king-george","tag-lexington","tag-massachusetts","tag-parliament","tag-pine-tree","tag-robert-albion","tag-slavery","tag-tariffs","tag-thomas-jefferson","tag-thomas-paine","tag-trade","tag-vermont"],"yoast_head":"\n1775: Putting Tyrants on the Run - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"250 years ago, militia men routed the world's best army, commencing the American Revolution\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/21\/1775-putting-tyrants-on-the-run\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"1775: Putting Tyrants on the Run - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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